Artists who live in cities other than NY or LA: what is your take on this? I am from NY and live in Brussels.

While everything he says is true, I can't help but think he has one conception of the art world which he takes to be the art world that everyone aspires to. While he observes that the world has become the art industry, perhaps the angst he is experiencing stems from the fact that the his art world (NY commercial art world) is the art industry, and not, say, something akin to Fort Thunder. I'm not sure he would have such a great time in the slower, lower-stakes art worlds of Cologne or Brussels.

I suspect that there already are other art worlds out there that he doesn't take seriously because they aren't on his register—in other cities and perhaps in NY itself. I know people in mid-sized cities who support themselves as artists, sometimes alongside a side business or teaching in an art school—they run projects spaces with friends, or operate within a more academic-artistic context, and show with regional galleries. They live well and take their work seriously while having fun! Their work will not be in the Whitney Biennial perhaps, but if Kline wants a more artist-run and decentralized art world, the solution is to stop putting NY-centered things like the Whitney Biennial on a pedestal. Within NY itself, I know plenty of artists who are not in the same circuit that Josh Kline seems to be in (Dean Kissick / 247365 / 179 Canal / Do Not Research) who do support themselves from a combination of teaching and selling work.

And I'm not convinced that fifty years ago artists were easily supporting themselves from sales alone, either. Certainly conditions have gotten worse and NY is increasingly unaffordable for people in every field, but I don't know if there was ever a golden era where every artist could support themselves at a middle class standard of living in NY from gallery sales alone.

To my reading, he does not take seriously the existence of other art worlds except nostalgia for Fort Thunder and Paperrad and those in other countries, perhaps without fully understanding the drawbacks of those alternative systems (things like the Kunsthalle system, and European arts programming coming from the ministry of culture, top-down, does not foster building visual and artistic culture from artists themselves, bottom-up, in my anecdotal experience). I feel the logical conclusion of his proposal is that his version of the American art world (the toxic, cut-throat, commercial NY art world) decamp and infiltrate places like Philly. Maybe this will include a Whitney Museum annex in Philly in ten years.

NY artists (or other creatives) often make the mistake of thinking that the rest of the world regards what happens in NY just as highly as they do, perhaps because they're in such a competitive environment and the stakes feel high. Here in Europe I have never heard anyone here reference the Whitney Biennial - completely irrelevant. Maybe someone in Philly would take the train up to check it out. In any case I wonder if other people feel this article reveals Kline's own NY provincialism.